Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (30 page)

Still the damning document existed, and there was reason to believe that the magazine, at least, would prevail in court. Under pressure to settle with
Look,
Jackie attended what was to have been a clandestine meeting at the Wall Street office of the magazine’s attorney. Methodically, dispassionately, she reviewed the proofs of the upcoming serialization, noting numerous personal details that she wanted expunged. She was smiling as she left the meeting, but her eyes moistened at the sight of waiting reporters. Manchester had not been present at the attorney’s office, but when he learned of the disparity between the calm countenance Jackie had worn during the proceedings and her tearful public display afterward, he judged the latter to have been nothing more than a pretty piece of theatrics.

From the moment that word of the gathering storm over the Manchester book first reached the White House, LBJ had been tracking it with immense interest and concern, not least because of rumors about the author’s relentlessly negative portrait of him. The psychological atmosphere in the Johnson camp approximated that of a bunker as the president, Lady Bird, and Johnson appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court Abe Fortas strategized on how best to respond to the charges of gross insensitivity to Jackie and the Kennedys that were about to fall on the White House like so many bombs. Intermittently, the president would break away from this anxious conversation, the better to concentrate on the latest news about the debacle in Vietnam from his perpetually blaring television set. The fact that such an unflattering account of his behavior in the aftermath of Dallas was about to be published was especially unwelcome at a moment when the nightmare that had haunted LBJ since day one of his presidency—that RFK would move to reclaim the throne—was threatening to become a reality.

For all that, it soon appeared as if the controversy might actually benefit the president as well. Reports of the internecine disagreement over whether to sue the author and his publishers appeared to offer Johnson the long-sought opening to detach Jackie from RFK. On December 16, the very day it was announced that Jackie would not be joining Bobby and his family in Sun Valley for Christmas after all, a carefully crafted letter that was deeply sympathetic to her court battle (“Lady Bird and I have been distressed to read the press accounts of your unhappiness about the Manchester book”) went out to her from LBJ. The president said he had seen accounts of her displeasure with certain passages in the manuscript that were unfavorable to Lady Bird and him. “If this is so,” Johnson wrote, “I want you to know while we deeply appreciate your characteristic kindness and sensitivity, we hope you will not subject yourself to any discomfort or distress on our account. One never becomes inured to slander but we have learned to live with it. In any event, your own tranquility is important to both of us, and we would not want you to endure any unpleasantness on our account.”

The December 16 letter was in fact a group effort. It had been Abe Fortas who composed the text and it had been Lady Bird’s idea for her husband to write to Jackie in his own hand. The often heavy-handed Johnson liked the letter so much that at one point he considered whether it might not be advantageous to release a copy to the press, but Fortas advised against it.

By the time Jackie replied to LBJ, on December 21, she had reluctantly settled with
Look
. The magazine had agreed to the edits she and her representatives had demanded. Yet she was still miserable, because, she made clear, she objected to all that remained as much as she did to the material that had been taken out. And what, after all, was the point of a lawsuit when no court, or out-of-court settlement, had the power to accomplish what she really wanted and needed—to make the floodgates close forever?

In the process of going to law, she had hurt people she cared about, and for what? “I am sick at the unhappiness this whole terrible thing has caused everyone,” Jackie told the president. “Whatever I did could only cause pain.” Though in the past she had been warned to guard against Johnson’s brazen attempts to manipulate her, Jackie, in her anguish, readily opened her heart to him now. She related that since her return from Hawaii the previous August, she had been constantly pleading by letter or telephone or in person with one or more people on the other side, or agonizing over what step to take next with the individuals who were helping her. To Jackie’s mind, the author and publishers had repeatedly broken their word, and she had finally come to understand that that was precisely what they intended to keep on doing—play cat and mouse with her until she was exhausted and they had managed to go to press.

Now, ostensibly, she was winning, but, as disclosed to LBJ, her victory struck her as hollow, with everything she had objected to in the book being printed all over the press anyway thanks to the twenty-five copies of the manuscript that had circulated to magazine editors in anticipation of the serial sale.

“I am so dazed now,” Jackie declared, “I feel I will never be able to feel anything again.”

Twelve

On December 20, 1966, the North American Newspaper Alliance sent out over the newswire an article “For Immediate Release,” accompanied by a note to the editors of ninety papers: “This may be the first article in newspapers that is openly critical of Jacqueline Kennedy’s posture in America—above and beyond her involvement in the Manchester dispute.”

Written by Vera Glaser, the syndicate’s Washington bureau chief, the piece made a striking claim: Jackie’s actions to obstruct the publication of
The Death of a President
served “to prolong the nation’s trauma.” Glaser noted that since Dallas, “The nation’s heart has gone out to her in love, sympathy, and protectiveness. Reams have been written applauding her courage.” But now, Glaser said, people were ready “to take a fresh look at the former first lady.” Glaser wrote of “a surfeited nation”; of “former admirers” who had begun to regard Jackie as “a professional martyr”; of critics who maintained that she was enjoying her prerogatives “beyond a reasonable statute of limitations.”

“Meanwhile,” Glaser went on, “it is worth noting that since November 22, 1963, more than six thousand Americans have met violent death in Vietnam. Like John F. Kennedy, these young men were young, stalwart, full of dreams and promise. Their mutilated remains have been shipped back in aluminum cases to grieving widows, most of whom are not beautiful and wealthy. Their courage as they struggle to rear children without fathers, cope with finances, pay mortgages and hunt jobs goes largely unsung.” Unlike Jackie Kennedy, the author suggested, these widows bravely “try not to look back.”

In the ensuing weeks and months, the Vera Glaser piece, which had appeared nationally under the headline “Uneasy Rests the Crown of JFK’s Jackie,” was followed by other severely critical articles in a variety of publications. As before, Jackie was charged with sabotaging press freedom and with treating the history of her late husband’s administration as her personal property. But, like Glaser’s, these new articles also hit hard at her personally. By turns, Jackie was assailed for wallowing in self-pity, and well-nigh accused of faking her pain in the interest of getting her way in the lawsuit. Scored for her spending and partying, she was portrayed as spoiled, frivolous, and imperious. “For the first time … Mrs. Kennedy has her back to the wall,” reported Mary McGrory in the
New York Post
. “The sympathy and understanding which the world has accorded her since her superlative demeanor during the tragedy is begrudged her.” Commenting on the opprobrium that was suddenly, stunningly being heaped upon his formerly sacrosanct sister-in-law, Bobby Kennedy, in a letter to
Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham, protested the relentless derision of “a girl who hadn’t committed any great crime but who day after day was being attacked and pilloried in all kinds of scandalous ways.” Jackie, said RFK, was “so upset and really crushed” by all the public criticism.

What caused Jackie to go from being idealized to stigmatized? The original Vera Glaser piece comes as close as any to spotlighting Jackie’s root transgression. It was, in the journalist’s phrase, “to revive the sadness and pain” associated with the Kennedy assassination. Glaser spoke to what she saw as the country’s desire for all that sadness to be at an end. Before Air Force One had even left Dallas on the day of the assassination, a fresh white dress and jacket and black shoes had been suggestively laid out for the widow by unseen hands: a tacit invitation to at least begin the process of distancing herself from the bloodshed. Since the time, four months later, when RFK assured TV viewers that Jackie was already making “a good deal of progress,” many had been the announcements and intimations that she was about to start a new life at last. Now, however, three years after her husband’s murder, her suffering was yet too raw and unprocessed for many people’s comfort. At a moment when Americans, still hungry for resolution, were devouring fresh details of Dallas in reports of the upcoming
Look
magazine serialization (both what had been left in and what had been cut), they began to turn against her en masse.

Jackie was far from the first traumatized person in history, and certainly not the last, to be treated in this manner. In a later era, for instance, the 9/11 New York City firefighters, originally lauded as heroes, were subsequently repudiated when they, like Jackie vis-à-vis the assassination, failed to recover quickly enough to satisfy the needs of a society determined to expunge the memory of suffering. These twenty-first-century fallen idols would be charged with offenses that included alcohol and substance abuse, brawling, and sexual misdeeds. Injured people may be used, as Jackie had surely been used by both Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, for political purposes. Yet so upsetting is it to have to contemplate human helplessness in the face of overwhelming events that at a certain point we may go so far as to indict the victim for reminding us of things that we prefer to suppress and forget. This rejection of the sufferer is what theorists refer to as the “second injury,” and at length it can prove to be even more damaging to the individual than the original traumatic episode.

The day after Christmas, Jackie went off to Bunny Mellon’s Antigua estate, hoping, by her own account, to temper her upset. On the evening of her first full day there she had gone for a swim when a pair of news photographers materialized in the crystalline waters near her hostess’s supposedly secure private beach. After Jackie’s Secret Service protectors chased the intruders off, a spokesperson issued a regal-sounding public statement of the former first lady’s extreme displeasure: “Mrs. Kennedy is irked. She has demanded complete privacy.” Irked? Demanded? That something had changed in press attitudes toward JFK’s widow was reflected in the often lighthearted coverage of the episode. The quotation marks in the
New York Times
headline, “Mrs. Kennedy ‘Irked,’” injected what looked to be a note of irony, suggesting that in the wake of the battle of the book, America’s patience with her haughty attitudes and locutions had begun to fray.

Jackie did not see the newspapers in Antigua, but in the course of her stay there she did find herself reading a story in a weeks-old magazine about the very controversy she had expressly traveled to the Caribbean to escape. The article reported Manchester’s assertion in the book that Jackie had objected to LBJ’s calling her “honey.” When she read that, she wrote to Johnson on her last day in Antigua: “All the rage that I have been trying to suppress and forget down here boiled up again.” At a moment when she was being widely criticized, Jackie, noting that “honey” was an affectionate word, insisted she would like to hear it more often. At a time when a great many people seemed to have altered toward her, Jackie emphasized the constancy of her feelings for Johnson, though she acknowledged that he too might be about to change. Predicting that she would no doubt wish she had torn this letter up as soon as she sent it off, Jackie explained that her purpose in writing it was to express “the fondness I will always feel for you—no matter what happens, and no matter how your feelings may change for me. Once I decide I care about someone—nothing can ever make me change.”

Two days before the first installment of the
Look
magazine serialization was due to appear on newsstands, Jackie returned to New York on the evening of Sunday, January 8, 1967, to find the entrance to her Fifth Avenue apartment building aglow in TV camera lights. Her hand reached up to shield her eyes against the glare as she entered the lobby, while reporters vainly shouted questions about “the book.” That same Sunday, the page-one headline of the city edition of the
World Journal Tribune
was “Jackie Comes Off Her Pedestal,” the first of a multi-part series. Calling the to-do over the Manchester book “tasteless, undignified, and ultimately pointless,” the writer Liz Smith declared that whether one agreed or disagreed with Jackie’s actions, it was clear she would not emerge from the episode “unscathed”: “From now on, she would never again appear in the limelight with quite all that queenly dignity intact. Things were being said, innuendoes repeated.” An accompanying page-one piece by Larry Van Gelder reported on “first details” from
The Death of a President
.

But taken by themselves, prepublication tidbits, no matter how alluring, offered little hint of the particular literary form Manchester had conceived for the material that
Look
had chosen for its premier installment. Perhaps it was his knowledge of the many nights Jackie had spent replaying the assassination in her thoughts that led him to tell this part of the story quite as he did; perhaps, too, it was that he had had something of the same experience himself after Okinawa. In any case, the author structured his narrative around a series of implicit what-if questions that did much to give the piece its unique psychological power. What if President Kennedy had not rejected the use of a bubble-top on the presidential limousine? What if one of the other proposed sites for the president’s speech had been chosen, which would have made it unnecessary to pass the Texas School Book Depository en route from the airport? What if the warnings to avoid Dallas altogether had not been ignored in Washington? What if some of the Secret Service agents had not stayed out late the night before? What if Marina Oswald had told her friend about Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle? What if Marina, who had left Lee, had agreed to return to him? What if she had not humiliated him the night before President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas? By repeatedly posing the question of how the outcome of November 22 might have been different had a single detail been altered, part one reflected the abiding human desire to believe that people are capable of controlling their own destinies. Like the obsessive ruminations of the PTSD sufferer, Manchester’s narrative allowed the reader to seek in his own mind to undo the chain of events that had led to the traumatic incident, and thereby to reestablish the illusion of control.